A critical-layer instability of structural acoustic wall modes in a two-flexible-plate channel with Poiseuille flow: closed-form low-Mach corrections and parity-protected absorption

A compressible fluid column between two thin elastic plates carrying plane Poiseuille flow supports discrete structural-acoustic wall modes. This paper analyses their coupled dispersion and reports a flow-induced instability. Because a no-slip profile has zero velocity at the wall, the convective (Ingard-Myers) term in the compliant-wall boundary condition vanishes identically, so the plate-admittance conditions stay Mach-independent and a Fredholm solvability argument yields a closed-form $O(M)$ correction to every coupled wavenumber, valid for any smooth no-slip shear profile. Above the critical Mach number $M_c=\mathrm{\Omega }\mathrm{/}\xi$ at which an interior critical layer first appears, the two structural branches behave oppositely. The antisymmetric mode is not absorbed by the critical layer, a null protected by an exact mid-plane pressure node rather than by weak coupling. The symmetric mode, which carries no such node, is convectively unstable. Its growth rate, fixed both by a spatial calculation anchored to the dissipative wall-Stokes term and by a convention-independent temporal one, strengthens towards the inviscid limit, identifying an inviscid critical-layer instability rather than a viscous artefact. A Briggs-Bers analysis classifies it as convective. Its neutral curve follows $M_c(\mathrm{\Omega })$, and its growth rate is proportional to the wall compliance, vanishing for rigid walls, so it is distinct from the Tollmien-Schlichting and Kelvin-Helmholtz mechanisms. Three independent numerical schemes agree to one part in ${10}^9$, and the closed-form correction matches numerical differentiation across three shear profiles.